Category

John Piper

Grace is not simply leniency when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.

The root of our sinfulness is the desire for our own happiness apart from God and apart from the happiness of others in God. All sin comes from a desire to be happy cut off from the glory of God and cut off from the good of others.

The key to Christian living is a thirst and hunger for God. And one of the main reasons people do not understand or experience the sovereignty of grace and the way it works through the awakening of sovereign joy is that their hunger and thirst for God is too small.

Jesus…is the Lion of Judah (Rev. 5:5) and the Lamb of God (Rev. 5:6) – He was lionhearted and lamblike, strong and meek, tough and tender, aggressive and responsive, bold and brokenhearted. He sets the pattern for manhood.

There will be no people in heaven who want to be around their things more than Jesus.

Consider Jesus. Know Jesus. Learn what kind of Person it is you say you trust and love and worship. Soak in the shadow of Jesus. Saturate your soul with the ways of Jesus. Watch Him. Listen to Him. Stand in awe of Him. Let Him overwhelm you with the way He is.

I measure Your love for me by the magnitude of the wrath I deserved and the wonder of Your mercy by putting Christ in my place.

Servanthood does not nullify leadership; it defines it. Jesus does not cease to be the Lion of Judah when He becomes the lamblike servant of the church.

So, you have three possibilities in world missions. You can be a goer, a sender, or disobedient. The Bible does not assume that everyone goes. But it does assume that the ones who do not go care about goers and support goers and pray for goers and hold the rope of the goers.

There are only three kinds of Christians when it comes to world missions: zealous goers, zealous senders, and disobedient.

This is the great business of life – to “put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks.” I know of no other way to triumph over sin long-term, than to gain a distaste for it, because of a superior satisfaction in God.

The Word of God is creative. It is a hammer that crushes the hardness of our insubordination. It is medicine that heals the broken-hearted. And it is light that gives us guidance and hope on our way.

The impulse to create the world was not from weakness, as though God were lacking in some perfection which creation could supply.

Christ died that we might live. This is the opposite of abortion. Abortion kills that someone might live differently.

One accurate way to describe abortion is subtle infanticide. That is: child-killing done in a way that the people don’t recognize it as child-killing. That reality is why the word abortion exists. Some words are created to cloak reality the same way procedures are created to cloak reality. “Abortion” is cloaked child-killing.

The abortion industry kills as many Black people every four days as the Klan killed in 150 years.

For we brought nothing into the world and we cannot take anything out of the world (1 Tim. 6:7). There are no U-Hauls behind hearses.

If you are afraid of hospitality – that you don’t have much personal strength or personal wealth – good. Then you won’t intimidate anybody. You will depend all the more on God’s grace. You will look all the more to the work of Christ and not your own work. And what a blessing people will get in your simple home or little apartment.

My take on tithing in America is that it’s a middle-class way of robbing God. Tithing to the church and spending the rest on your family is not a Christian goal. It’s a diversion. The real issue is: How shall we use God’s trust fund – namely, all we have – for His glory? In a world with so much misery, what lifestyle should we call our people to live? What example are we setting?

This is God’s universal purpose for all Christian suffering: more contentment in God and less satisfaction in the world.

God is not unjust. No one will be condemned for not believing a message they have never heard. Those who have never heard the gospel will be judges by their failure to own up to the light of God’s grace and power in nature and in their own conscience.

Headship is the divine calling of a husband to take primary responsibility for Christlike, servant leadership, protection, and provision in the home.

Staying married, therefore, is not mainly about staying in love. It is about keeping covenant. “Till death do us part” or “As long as we both shall live” is a sacred covenant promise – the same kind Jesus made with His bride when He died for her.